CHAPTER TWO

MATRICES

GERMANY BECAME AN official member of the League of Nations’ Preparatory Commission on Disarmament in 1926. The adjective, not the noun, was the key word in that body’s title. Its history is a story of gridlock. German policy makers were by no means secretive or cynical. They insisted openly and emphatically that collective security depended on equality of armed forces at mutually acceptable levels. That meant revision of Europe’s status quo not necessarily on Germany’s terms, but in Germany’s favor. Reducing numbers and limiting weapons—particularly the “offensive” weapons like tanks and aircraft, so often excoriated by disarmament advocates—could only improve Germany’s relative position.

I

DISARMAMENT OFFERED OTHER prospects. By the mid-1920s the Reichswehr was internationally admired for the quality of its personnel, the level of its training, and not least its high morale. Its numerical weakness limited its operational worth against its neighbors’ exponentially stronger conscript forces. Reducing those armies’ numbers would highlight the advantages of a professional, long-service force. And it would be the Reichswehr that possessed the advantage of direct experience with such a system.

By the mid-1920s Germany’s military helplessness in practical contexts was beyond reasonable denial. In the east, man for man and company for company, the Reichswehr might be exponentially superior to Polish conscripts. But what if the Poles kept coming until the Germans ran out of ammunition? German plans involved creating local volunteer forces as a second line. But the probable survival time of an SA Standarte or a Stahlhelm detachment against a Polish battalion in the open field was measurable in hours—perhaps minutes. In the west, the Ruhr occupation of 1923 and the bloody record of contemporary French imperialism from Syria to Morocco indicated that anything like the civilian-based Volkskrieg (People’s War) advocated by some enthusiasts might salvage German national honor, but at a price neither politicians nor soldiers were willing to consider.

A Truppenamt war game in the winter of 1928-29 was set in the context of a two-front war with France and Poland—hardly an illogical scenario. Even with allowances for Poland keeping strong forces to watch its Soviet frontier, even by incorporating projected possible augmenting of the Reichswehr’s force structure, the most favorable outcomes involved delaying actions fought in a militarily hopeless cause.

The Reichswehr was not “militaristic” in the sense made famous by Alfred Vagts. Its generals were not content to supervise drills, organize parades, and conduct elaborate exercises with simulated armies. The conclusion that increasingly permeated senior Reichswehr leadership was nevertheless simple and startling. Because Germany could not wage war, war must be avoided. As a corollary, revising Versailles by abrogating its disarmament clauses was likely to make Germany’s last condition worse than its first. A program of military expansion designed to raise the republic’s armed forces to the levels of even Poland or Czechoslovakia was likely to have a general ripple effect: an arms race forcing Germany into a competition it had no chance of winning, a stern chase to nowhere. Even before the onset of the Great Depression, there was no practical chance that Germany’s voters would underwrite such a policy in the absence of a tangible, immediate threat.

Substantive concessions on the issue of arms limitation would not have guaranteed European stability. They did offer a window of opportunity for continued, positive German participation in a modified treaty framework. But any serious steps to restoring Germany’s military strength in any parameters ran directly counter to France’s continued commitment to maintaining its security directly, through its own armed forces and a system of alliances. With economic and diplomatic independence increasingly becoming the new European order, with an increasingly factionalized polity influenced by increasingly strong anti-war sentiments, France was essentially unable to move toward a compromise with Germany on arms control even if the will to do so had existed.

By 1930 even internationally conscious Reichswehr personalities like Groener were growing frustrated by a policy seeming to offer nothing but indefinite postponements. The long-projected plans for expanding the Reichswehr to a 21-division force were made increasingly comprehensive. An initial Aufstellungsplan of April 1931 and a Second Armaments Program in early 1932 provided for assembling essential material: uniforms, personal gear, rifles, and machine guns. By 1933 about two-thirds of the hardware was in place. It was, however, easier to produce equipment than to find men. The Great War veterans as a class were getting long in the tooth for service in the combat arms. The Restructuring Plan of November 1932 offered placebos: integrating police units and volunteer home guard formations, enlisting a few thousand men for three-year terms, encouraging men to volunteer for a few weeks’ elementary training. An alternate prospect—and a corresponding challenge—was, however, emerging. And it was here that the army began finding common ground with the emerging National Socialists.

The Nazi Party has been compared by scholars to almost every possible human organization, even medieval feudalism. The one adjective that cannot be applied is “patriarchal.” Hitler’s public persona was that of leader, elder brother, perhaps even erotic symbol, but never a father. Change—progress—was the movement’s flywheel. Nazi nostalgia found its essential expression in domestic kitsch. It had no place in military matters. The Reichswehr and the “Movement”—die Bewegung, as the Nazis preferred to be known—thus had the common ground of emphasizing a commitment to the future rather than a vision of the past. Hitler’s initially enthusiastic wooing of the soldiers was based on his intention of using them first to consolidate his hold over both the Nazi party and the German people, then as the standard-bearers of territorial and ideological expansion until they could safely be replaced by the SS. The Reichswehr for its part also saw the Nazis as means to an end, albeit the more pedestrian one of increasing the armed forces’ resources.

National Socialist views of war differed in important, arguably essential respects from those of the Reichswehr. But on such subjects as anti-Marxism, anti-pacifism, and hostility to the Versailles Treaty, the military’s values were not incongruent with those avowed by Nazi theorists and propagandists. Those positions were also respectable across a broad spectrum of Weimar politics. Germany wanted normalcy in the years after 1918, but was unable to achieve it at the price of abandoning the illusions and delusions of the Great War. The gradual turn to Nazism that began in the late 1920s, represented a “flight forward,” an effort to escape that cognitive dissonance, as much as it reflected a belief in the Nazis’ promises to make things better.

The Reichswehr was not a fascist coup or a right-wing conspiracy waiting to happen. From its inception, the Reichswehr had regarded itself not as an independent player but a participant in a common national enterprise based on rearmament and revision. Refusal to identify the armed forces directly with the Republic facilitated the transfer of loyalties from the Empire. It enabled avoidance on one hand of the problems of a Soviet model of military professionals reduced to technicians while commissars wielded real power and, on the other, of the risks of saddling Germany with an officer corps of mercenary technocrats. Yet as the gulf between soldiers and politicians widened, as the Republic’s crisis deepened with the depression, few officers saw their responsibilities to the state in any but the narrowest terms. The results of the war game of December 1932, with its predictions of domestic collapse should Nazis and Communists combine against an overextended, outnumbered, and probably outgunned Reichswehr, were presented with a kind of malicious pleasure that reflected more than simple anti-republican sentiment. It suggested instead a fundamental detachment from a “system” that remained fundamentally alien to an army with its own independent, comprehensive ties to state and society.

In the early 1930s, Germany was being swept by a wave of popular militarism and quasi-militarism, extending across the political and cultural spectrum. The Communists’ Red Front Fighters’ League, the Social Democratic Reichsbanner, the right-wing Stahlhelm, and above all the National Socialist SA attracted increasing numbers of young men who thought they were tough and were willing to prove it. Beer mugs, lead pipes, and an occasional knife were not likely to intimidate external enemies. But however much Reichswehr planners and Reichswehr officers might dislike the revolutionary premises underpinning these organizations, the possibilities inherent in bringing storm troopers into uniform and under army discipline were too enticing to be ignored—to say nothing of the corresponding risks of leaving them to their own devices and those of their leaders, including Adolf Hitler.

The Reichswehr understood better than any army in Europe or the world that total war and industrial war had generated new styles of combat and new methods of leadership. The officer no longer stood above his unit but functioned as an integral part of it. The patriarchal/ hegemonial approach of the “old army,” with professional officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) parenting youthful conscripts and initiating them into adult society, was giving way to a collegial/affective pattern, emphasizing cooperation and consensus in mission performance. “Mass man” was a positive danger in the front lines. What was necessary was “extraordinary man”: the combination of fighter and technician who understood combat both as a skilled craft and an inner experience. The street brawlers of 1931-32 were promising raw material for a new military order. In passing, those would be exactly the qualities eventually cultivated in the panzertruppen.

Mechanization temporarily receded into the background with the Nazi seizure of power in March 1933. Or perhaps, better said, it was subsumed in the metastasizing of German armed forces under the Nazi New Order. One of Hitler’s first acts as Chancellor was to appoint General Werner von Blomberg as Minister of Defense on January 30, 1933. This reflected a wider bargain—Hitler openly acknowledged the Reichswehr as the leading institution in the state, and promised to initiate a general rearmament program. In return, the Reichswehr relinquished its long-standing responsibility for maintaining domestic order, giving Hitler a de facto free hand in Germany’s “restructuring.”

The next three or four years were the golden age—at least in public—of what Hitler called the “two pillars” rhetoric: the assertion that the armed forces and the Nazi movement were the twin foundations of a reborn Germany. Internationally, after a few months of smoke and mirrors, Hitler withdrew Germany not only from the Disarmament Conference but from the League of Nations in October 1933. In December he decided to triple Germany’s peacetime army to a strength of 300,000. Its 21 divisions would form the eventual basis for a field army of triple that number. The mission of that force was described as conducting a defensive war on several fronts with a good chance of success.

A long-standing critic of Groener’s position, Blomberg supported rearmament in a specifically military context. He was correspondingly willing to accept both the internal strains placed on the newly renamed Wehrmacht by forced-draft expansion and the international challenges posed by its precondition: the reintroduction of conscription. Hitler’s breaking of the SA’s power in June 1934 seemed to offer fundamental proof of the Führer’s good faith. By March 1935, when Hitler declared “military sovereignty,” the Truppenamt was projecting a peacetime force of 30 to 36 divisions, increasing to 73 on mobilization. By July the newly rechristened General Staff planned for a peacetime establishment of 700,000 by—a strange coincidence—October 1939. By 1936 the army’s projected war footing was 3,737,000 men in 103 “divisional units”—a force profile comparing favorably with France’s mobilized strength.

The Wehrmacht’s plans and projections heralded and structured the takeoff of a growth that rapidly became its own justification and eventually outran both financial resources and production capacity. It also initiated an increasingly fierce competition with a newly created air force and a resurgent navy. In those contexts, theater was everything. And the army was not behindhand in showing off its bag of tricks. Oswald Lutz organized Germany’s first tank unit on November 1, 1933. Kraftfahrlehrkommando Zossen consisted of a single skeleton company with fourteen “tractors.” Another 150 chassis for training drivers were delivered in January 1934. In July, Lutz was appointed head of the new Kom mando der Panzertruppen (Armored Forces Command), with Guderian still his chief of staff. By November the original company had been expanded into a two-battalion regiment, with a second created at the training ground of Ohrdruf.

Adolf Hitler might have run for office in good part on the strength of his wartime service as a muddy-boots infantryman. But the Führer also had a predilection for high-tech displays. Hitler’s use of airplanes in his later election campaigns was as much for show as for convenience. His speeches approached the level of sound and light shows. And his fondness for muscle cars and fast driving was familiar. In early 1934, accompanied by Hermann Göring, he made what probably began as a routine inspection of new equipment. Guderian instead put on what later generations of soldiers would describe as a dog-and-pony show. For a half hour he showed off a motorcycle platoon, a platoon of the 37mm antitank guns just coming on line, a couple of armored car platoons, and the pièce de résistance: a platoon of the new training tanks. Chassis only, with no turrets, no armament, they nevertheless impressed the Führer. Guderian quotes him as repeatedly exclaiming, “That’s what I want! That’s what I want to have!”

Did Hitler actually see the military possibilities of these few dozen small vehicles? More likely he was taken by their potential for reinforcing his comprehensive propaganda campaigns, domestic and foreign, in the same context as his admonition to Göring that numbers of planes took precedence over their types and combat value. Certainly he did nothing specific to expand the armored force as such. The High Command and the General Staff took care of that on their own. In 1934, as the original seven Reichswehr divisions began to triple themselves, their motor battalions produced fourteen antitank battalions and seven motorized reconnaissance battalions. The 1st and 2nd Cavalry Divisions took delivery of several hundred motor vehicles. The 3rd not only traded in its horses altogether, but came under command of the Inspectorate of Motorized Combat Troops.

That last was the result of a suggestion made by one of the army’s rising stars. Then-Brigadier General Walther von Reichenau is best known as one of Hitler’s early open sympathizers among the Reichswehr’s senior officers. He was also interested in motorization, and as an artillery specialist was concerned with keeping even an embryonic armored force from becoming too much a thing in itself. As chief of the Wehrmachtamt, he was in a position to influence policy. It was the kind of gesture Lutz welcomed as one of the preliminary steps intended to produce an armored force of three divisions, plus two or three independent tank brigades, by the end of 1938.

On July 1, 1934, the Inspectorate of Motor Combat troops was reorganized. The Inspectorate for Army Motorization was made responsible for overall supervision of the process. The Motor Combat Troops Command would control the projected panzer divisions, in effect becoming a corps-level field command. Lutz assumed command of both agencies; his ambitious amanuensis Heinz Guderian became Motor Combat Troops Chief of Staff—a fast-track posting, if the holder could develop it. Lutz had no doubts.

II

THE PROJECTED GERMAN force structures were hardly unique. France’s horsed cavalry divisions were not very different from the German models. Contemporary Polish mobilization plans projected mobile or “mixed divisions.” In the course of the decade, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria would collect their respective tank and motorized elements into ad hoc “fast divisions,” though these reflect available forces rather than any real doctrine. But the German stress on mobility, deep penetration, envelopment, and initiative was original. It reflected growing institutionalization of the concept that future campaigns would be decided at neither tactical nor strategic levels, but in the previously vaguely defined intermediate sphere of operations.

The question nevertheless remained: How did mechanization best fit into the army’s overall rearmament program? Arguably the central figure in providing an answer was Ludwig Beck, Chief of the Truppenamt (which resumed the name of General Staff in 1935) from 1933 to 1938. His post made him responsible for considering and integrating mechanized mobility into German military planning. His character and temperament created two sets of myths. That of the lesser world, fostered in particular by Guderian in his widely read memoirs, depicts Beck as conservative to the point of reaction on the subject, committed to mass armies in the old style, with no understanding of armor technology and no concept of using tanks except as infantry support. From the greater world of Beck’s growing distrust of Hitler, escalating as early as 1938 into active opposition, comes the hypothesis of his resistance to the Führer’s aggressive foreign policy, including an attempt to retard development of the mobile forces that were its primary instrument.

Both interpretations are misleading. No less than the rest of the senior officer corps, Beck supported rearmament and revision of the Versailles treaty—ultimately by force. The question was, what kind of force. On one hand Beck carefully studied British and French developments in tank technology and armor doctrine, in particular the works of Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, military attaché to Britain, who discussed the concepts frequently with Liddell- Hart and other leading politicians and soldiers. Schweppenburg observed the British armor maneuvers of 1932 and 1934, submitting detailed and enthusiastic reports. Beck supplemented these with his own analysis of the British experience—particularly the continuing problems of controlling armored forces larger than a small brigade.

In June 1935, before the initial field exercises of the original panzer division, Beck conducted a staff ride based on a counteroffensive by no fewer than three panzer divisions, plus infantry, against a Czechoslovakian attack in the region of the Erzgebirge. The nature of the terrain stacked the deck; it was little surprise that Beck described tanks as weapons of opportunity, best employed in limited sectors. He also stressed the importance of all- arms cooperation. He asserted that once the front was broken, armored formations could operate effectively, perhaps decisively, on enemy flanks and in the rear areas.

That was about as close to a mainstream position as could be found in the Wehrmacht. Beck was willing to prognosticate—a staff exercise in 1936 was built around an entire armored army. In practical terms, however, he implemented a policy of general mechanization. The three panzer divisions discussed earlier would, by September 1939, be complemented by 36 more tank battalions primarily intended for infantry support—a ratio of one battalion per infantry division of the projected army. Beck also planned to motorize some infantry divisions, partially motorize others, and create light mechanized divisions more or less on the French model. These policies were implemented in 1936. In a technical context, Beck pushed for the development of medium tanks and for an even heavier “breakthrough” model.

This comprehensive approach was, in terms of army politics, a way of encouraging cooperation by spreading the wealth. In the same context it provided for healthy competition: a broad spectrum of approaches to a fundamentally new means of making war. No one really knew, for example, how antitank techniques and technologies would develop relative to the tanks’ capacities. Beck was correspondingly willing to let other states—those that could afford errors—take the lead in major institutional and doctrinal innovation.

Beck’s approach to armored-force development also reflected a general concept of rearmaments progressing by measured stages in a context of limited resources, human and material. Effective cadres for training and command could not be conjured from thin air and 100,000 men. The German auto industry had developed to serve specialized markets, and would take time to adjust to large-scale manufacturing of military vehicles. In 1939 there was still no system for converting the industry to war production. Steel and oil, the panzers’ bone and blood, were in short supply and high demand. Heinz Guderian’s brand of optimism on that issue was well enough; perhaps even desirable, in an officer with limited responsibilities. Beck and the General Staff had to plan for the army—and consider as well what to do if those plans did not survive the proverbial first contact with an enemy.

Requiring consideration as well was the possibility of a preventive strike by Germany’s neighbors—perhaps a preemptive one, given Hitler’s increasingly assertive foreign policy. Infantry divisions were like municipal bonds. They were a safe military bet: easily raised, trained, and equipped; providing no original threats. And should the armored- force enthusiasts be proven correct, the separate tank formations could readily be combined into divisions and replaced in turn by new creations.

In October 1934, the army issued a table of organization for an “experimental armored division.” Built around the Zossen and Ohrdruf tank regiments, the formation included a motorized brigade with a motorcycle battalion and a two-battalion “light rifle regiment”; an antitank battalion with 36 towed 37mm guns and eventually a battery of 20mm self-propelled antiaircraft cannon; a reconnaissance battalion of motorcycles and armored cars; and an artillery regiment with two battalions of 105mm howitzers, one truck-drawn and the other self-propelled. The 3rd Cavalry Division provided troops and cadres for what, on October 15, 1935, officially became the 1st Panzer Division. It took the field for the first time in August, and encompassed 13,000 men, more than 4,000 wheeled vehicles, and almost 500 tracked ones, at the Lüneberg maneuver grounds near Münster in Westphalia.

Lutz took personal charge of an exercise that still depended heavily on simulation and imagination. Tanks were in short supply relative to theoretical strengths and types. Radio allocations were incomplete. The division commander, Maximilian von Weichs, had been directly reassigned from the 3rd Cavalry Division, and retained a horseman’s perspective. Many of the junior officers and enlisted men also came from freshly converted cavalry regiments. Training beyond crew levels was still a work in progress. But the former troopers were keen. When Army Commander in Chief Werner von Fritsch demanded the division execute a 90-degree turn to meet a theoretical flank attack, the movement was completed in just under 90 minutes, with a minimum of loose ends.

Fritsch was suitably impressed, and Lutz’s report was appropriately enthusiastic. The tanks covered an average of 600 kilometers, with only 27 breakdowns—a good sign of fundamentally sound design and manufacture. Tanks must be used in masses and organized in large formations. Single battalions or regiments could only succeed against limited objectives. Should armor be designated specifically for infantry support—a policy Lutz criticized—it must be organized in brigade strength. In that context, Lutz recommended a tank brigade of three two-battalion regiments as optional. This would give the division a total of more than 500 tanks—an excessive number by later standards, but arguably defensible when most of the available vehicles in the near future would be armed with nothing more lethal than rifle-caliber machine guns.

Lutz’s concept of using tanks in masses reflected more than Reichswehr-era theory. He and Guderian had visited the Soviet Union in 1932, and had kept abreast of intelligence reports on Soviet tank and vehicle production. Guderian considered the Red Army to be leading the world in mechanization. His criticism of the relatively inflexible Soviet concept of three distinct missions—close infantry support, breakthrough, and deep penetration—was acknowledged in Lutz’s assertion that the combination of a tank brigade and a motorized brigade, the two complementing each other, enabled the division to perform a broad and changing spectrum of tasks.

No less relevant for the panzer arm’s development was the assertion that, especially in combat, radio was by far the best means of rapid, secure communication among motorized formations. Commanders therefore needed armored command and signal vehicles, because they must be at the head of their units. That final statement was not merely a challenge to, but a denial of, the Great War model of command exercised from rear-echelon communications centers. It was no less a significant modification of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder’s familiar aphorism that “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Future commanders of mobile, mechanized forces would be in a position to make, remake, and implement plans reflecting changing situations.

Lutz’s report confirmed the Army High Command’s earlier decision to create two more panzer divisions. It stressed the importance of creating divisional headquarters as soon as possible in order to provide guidance as men were assembled and equipment delivered. Command of the 2nd went, predictably, to Guderian. The 3rd’s commanding officer was Ernst Fessman, a cavalryman by branch but with experience commanding both a motor battalion in the Reichswehr and the first tank brigade in 1934-35. As for the deployment of the new formations, Guderian recommended, presumably with Lutz’s concurrence, that one panzer division be stationed in Berlin and one in Weimar. These would be responsible for defending Germany’s east. The third division should be deployed in the region of Würzburg-Bamberg to provide defensive strength against the French. The three projected independent brigades should also probably be located with a view to their operational employment in western Germany.

This in-house memorandum goes against both the long-standing theoretical approach of concentrating armored forces in mass and the long-standing myth of the panzer arm as the mailed fist of Nazi aggression. At this stage Germany was still seriously vulnerable, and the very success of Lutz’s 1935 exercise highlighted that vulnerability. How best to counter attacks spearheaded by similar large armored formations? The standard recommendation was “offensive defense”: strategic/operational delaying actions conducted at the tactical level by mobile ripostes, in particular outflanking movements, once the infantry had taken some of the edge off enemy armor.

German divisions had a total of 72 antitank guns, half assigned to regiments, half pooled in a divisional battalion, all motorized—a flexible and formidable force in an essentially horse-powered formation. The gun itself, a Rheinmetall-designed 37mm piece, had been under development since 1925, and in small-scale production since 1928. With its original spoke wheels replaced in 1924 by pneumatic tires, it was a handy and mobile weapon, highly effective against the kinds of tanks currently in foreign service and well suited to the tactics of shield and sword in a combined-arms context.

“Offensive defense” reflected—perhaps viscerally—the postulate that Germany’s major probable enemies would be slow-moving (the French) or slow-thinking (the Poles). In slightly modified form it would emerge again in the aftermath of Stalingrad. It was nevertheless a dead-end option—not least because the style and nature of Hitler’s foreign policy was making it increasingly obvious at the army’s higher levels that any trouble Germany got into would require self-extraction. The international community was hardly likely to be forthcoming and benevolent toward a systematically antagonistic Reich.

At the same time new types and families of armored fighting vehicles were entering service. The centerpiece was the Panzer I. Its genesis was the 1932 purchase of a vehicle from Britain. The Vickers-Carden-Lloyd was what was called a “tankette”: a turretless one- or two-man vehicle, more of a machine-gun carrier than anything else but easy to manufacture and, above all, cheap. The initial German intention was to use the chassis to mount a 20mm cannon in a revolving turret. When that proved too heavy, two light machine guns were substituted. The first prototypes were delivered by Krupp in February 1934. Four months later a satisfied army ordered an initial production run of 150, and then doubled it.

Originally the Panzer I had been viewed as a temporary measure, a training vehicle and nothing more. But when the better-armed and armored versions expected to replace it encountered developmental troubles, the little hybrid became an operational vehicle. Between October 1937 and September 1939 its numbers remained stable at around 1,450. The definitive Panzer I weighed a little under six tons, had a two-man crew, and armor protection good only against small arms. It also had two less-visible qualities that were to impact the panzer arm for half its combat existence. Each vehicle carried a radio and mounted a powerful, reliable engine, giving it a top road speed of 25 miles per hour. “Train as you fight” was a long-standing mantra in the German army. It might be said as well that a new weapons system is like a first lover: the experiences, good and bad, remain vivid. The peacetime tankers who began as corporals and lieutenants were formed in their concepts of armored war not only by doctrine and training, but by the cracker boxes in which they learned the hands-on aspects of survival: communications and mobility to set up and get out of “shoot-and-scoot,” and “hit ’em where they ain’t” tactical situations.

The Panzer II was another consequence of the retarded development of heavier models. Its specifications were issued in July 1934, and the winning design was submitted by Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nuremberg (MAN)—a newcomer to the armaments field, a choice reflecting in part the army’s commitment to involving as many firms as possible in the production process.

Inexperience on all levels had a price. It took MAN longer to manufacture even preproduction models; the engineers and the soldiers constantly meddled with the design. Not until 1937 did mass production begin. The basic version, Models A, B, and C, weighed in at a little under nine tons, was armed with a 20mm turret cannon, and had a range of around 125 miles and a road speed of around 25 miles per hour. Models D and E had their tracks and suspensions modified to enable speeds up to 35 miles per hour, but at a significant sacrifice of cross-country performance.

Panzer II models supplemented rather than replaced Panzer I in a rapidly expanding armored force. By the outbreak of war, more than 1,200 were on line as stablemates of the smaller vehicles. Their stopgap character was recognized from the beginning. Mechanical reliability, ease of operation, and long range could not compensate for a main armament primarily effective against soft-skinned vehicles. If the type had a future it was in reconnaissance, not combat. Wehrmacht designers and planners instead projected a standard tank battalion of three companies armed with effective armor-piercing guns and one company with larger-caliber weapons.

The Panzer III represented half of that future. Its design orders were first issued in 1935, and for security purposes it was initially designated “platoon commander’s vehicle.” The first four prototypes, offered by four different firms, were tested in late 1936. The winner was Daimler-Benz, but the contract proved a mixed blessing. The original specifications were for a tank weighing 15 tons and capable of 25 miles per hour. Daimler made the weight by limiting the armor to Panzer II levels, and adapted a suspension system from its civilian vehicles that restricted the speed to 20 miles per hour. The result was more tinkering. A reworked suspension and a more powerful engine improved the speed even when the armor was increased to as much as 30mm, offering reasonable protection against large fragments from artillery shells and glancing hits from antitank rounds. The design’s final weight was 19.5 tons—still well below the 24 tons that were the limit of German field bridges.

All this took time. The Panzer III went through no fewer than four type designations before the Model E was considered sufficiently refined to manufacture in some numbers. Even then the first general-production version of the tank was one letter later. The Mark F went into production in September 1939—just too late for the Polish campaign.

The same could not be said, albeit just barely, for its designated partner. The Panzer IV would remain in production throughout the war. The most numerous and the most versatile tank the Wehrmacht developed, it is also usually considered one of the world’s classic armored vehicles, a strong contender for Top Ten status in any comparative listing. Its origins were unpretentious. The Weapons Office wanted armaments firms to gain experience designing and producing heavy tanks. Lutz and Guderian had from early days seen the need for a support tank. The result was a project for a “battalion commander’s vehicle” of 24 tons—the bridge weight limit—mounting a 75mm gun, which was really a howitzer, only 24 calibers long. Dubbed by its crews as the “cigar butt” and other, cruder names involving length, its high-explosive and smoke shells were intended to provide for close support—not only for tanks but for their accompanying infantry. In the war’s early years, however, a three-inch shell exploding on or near a tank could do significant damage—not least to crew morale. The Panzer IV would acquire from its early days an enduring reputation as a formidable opponent.

The Panzer IV suffered from an embryonic armament industry’s lack of experience producing even moderately large tanks, and from an increasingly overstrained manufacturing capacity. Only about 200 were on inventory by September 1, 1939. That was enough, however, to begin allocating a company to each battalion, and to test the three-to-one combination initially proposed by Lutz and Guderian. The design withstood prototype testing admirably. The Panzer IV’s suspension matched its eventual 20-ton weight, and was so reliable it became standard for all the later versions. Its superstructure was proportioned generously enough to allow for up-gunning. Its turret was electrically powered, improving exponentially the chances of getting off the first shot so often decisive in mobile war. Add standard frontal armor of up to 50mm, with 20mm on the sides and rear, plus a reliable Maybach engine giving a top speed of 20 miles per hour and a 100-mile range, and the Panzer IV was a crew’s delight when it began entering unit service in 1938.

The panzer force was taking delivery of a wide variety of other armored vehicles as well. Among the most significant, and probably the most overlooked, was the armored command vehicle. Lutz’s insistence that commanders of mobile forces must command from the front implied a need for an appropriate mount. The early tanks were too small and cramped to allow for the additional, still-bulky signal apparatus, and for an extra man to operate it. In 1938 the first versions of a converted Panzer I made their appearance. The turret was replaced by a fixed superstructure, a signaler was added, and the interior reconfigured to accommodate a table, map boards, and most important, two radios: one to communicate with the unit’s tanks and one to keep in touch with higher headquarters. They were cramped and inconvenient, but the equipment worked—and they looked enough like ordinary tanks not to offer obvious targets. Around 200 were available for the Polish campaign, where they proved key links in the communications network that gave the Wehrmacht its nervous system.

In the German concept of mobile war, wheels were only marginally less important than tracks. That said, the first example was unimpressive: an open-topped scout car built on a civilian truck chassis, with a two-man crew, 8mm of armor, and a light machine gun. Entering service with the cavalry, by 1939 it had devolved to the infantry’s reconnaissance battalions as one step above bicycles. Next step was a two-step: the development and introduction of the Leichter Panzerspähwagen Sonderkraftfahrzeug (SdKfz) 221/222—a Teutonic mouthful that translates as Armored Reconnaissance Car Special Purpose Motor Vehicle 221/222, and thankfully shortens simply to Armored Car 221/222. The latter, definitive version began joining reconnaissance battalions during 1938. A four-wheeled, five-ton vehicle, with a 20mm cannon or a light antitank rifle in an open-topped turret and a two-man crew, it could do 50 miles per hour on roads, half that across country, thanks to its four-wheel drive and a relatively powerful engine. The 222 was popular in service and easy enough to manufacture that a number were exported to Nationalist China, where it was also well liked.

The 222 is best understood as an upscale version of the Daimler scout car coming into British service about the same time. It could gather information but was ill-suited to fight for it. Apart from that, the German army had enough of a tradition of heavy wheeled vehicles to encourage the simultaneous development of the SdKfz Heavy Armored Car 231—Six-Wheeled. The 231 could trace its origins to a civilian-developed vehicle whose initial version was too heavy and too expensive. Rejiggered into a six-wheel design built, initially, around a Daimler-Benz truck chassis, the 231 first entered service in 1932. Its ancestry was both visible and problematic. It looked like a civilian automobile, in that unlike the 222, its engine was up front and vulnerable even given the well-sloped 14.5mm armor. At almost six tons, the weight was too heavy for the chassis, and the suspension was a constant source of concern despite the good road speed of 40 miles per hour. Like the 222, it was easy to manufacture—a thousand were created by the time production ceased in 1935. But even more than the Panzer I, the Armored Car 231 was used as a training vehicle and relegated to second-line service as fast as a replacement could be made available.

That replacement kept the designation, but was an entirely different vehicle: an eight-wheeled, rear-engineered design built on a Buessing-NAG chassis. It could do over 50 miles per hour on roads, 30 miles per hour off road. With dual steering, all-wheel drive, and independent suspension, its cross-country capacity even through sand and mud exceeded any wheeled, armored vehicle in any army, despite its relatively heavy weight. Its turret-mounted 20mm cannon and 15mm armor were adequate for the scouting mission that was its fundamental purpose, and from its first entry into service in 1938, the Achtrad “eight-wheeler” was popular with its crews. The complexity that made it difficult and expensive to manufacture was an acceptable tradeoff, especially given the increasing quality of unit-level maintenance in the Panzer arm. The new 231’s major tactical drawback was its size. At seven feet eight inches and 8.3 tons, it was not exactly suited for “sneak and peek.” For “shoot and scoot,” however, the Achtrad was unmatched during the war’s first half, and its size enabled the inclusion of a radio system that added “communication” to its long list of positives.

The 222 and 231 spawned a long list of modifications. Most were specialized radio vehicles. The 222 in particular was too small to carry both a radio and a cannon. Its near-sister SdKfz 223 was distinguished by a smaller machine-gun turret and carried a third crew member. Both six- and eight-wheel versions of the 231 also had radio versions with frame aerials. These, perhaps because of their distinctive appearance, are disproportionately featured in illustrated works despite their relatively small numbers.

This is one of the points in the narrative where it is tempting to dive into the permutations and modifications of design and armament that give Hitler’s panzers their enduring appeal to buffs, hobbyists, and rivet heads. There are, for example the various artillery tractors that kept the guns within supporting range of the tanks. There is even a half-track motorcycle, initially developed to tow the 37mm antitank gun. Space and discipline combine, however, to take us forward to the last major family of armored vehicles that Germany took to war in 1939—half-tracks.

The SdKfz 251 stands with the Panzer IV at the focal point of Wehrmacht armor. Its only rival for “best of its kind” was its US army counterpart. It was a bit of a military afterthought. German infantry had regularly ridden trucks to the combat zone during maneuvers since the Reichswehr years. In the early days of the armored force, motorcycles were so popular that five of the nine rifle companies in a panzer division’s rifle brigade rode them. Trucks and cycles, however, shared common problems: high vulnerability and limited off-road capacity. On the other hand, the panzers’ commitment to the principle of close tank-infantry cooperation was reinforced by the experiences of both sides in the Spanish Civil War, when tanks operating alone in broken or built-up terrain proved highly vulnerable to infantry who kept their heads. In a 1937 exercise, the modified civilian two-wheel-drive trucks assigned to the motorized infantry performed so badly that Guderian, still a mere colonel, directly challenged the army’s commander in chief, Werner von Fritsch, to remedy the situation.

“Had my advice been followed, we would now have a real armored force” were bold words, often cited to prove Guderian’s professional conviction, his moral courage, and his arrogance, depending on the author’s perspective. In fact, exercises and maneuvers were historically regarded as high-stress situations where such outbursts were more or less predictable, and Fritsch had a known high tolerance for young enthusiasts. Guderian, moreover, was widely understood as Lutz’s protégé (an alternate German word is Protektionskind, “favorite child”). In short, he got away with it.

In concrete terms, Lutz and Guderian pressed for the development of an infantry-carrying vehicle with sufficient cross-country mobility to accompany tanks into action, and with enough armor and firepower to allow the crew to fight from it, if necessary. Such a vehicle had to meet two external requirements. It had to be cheap, and it could not interfere with tank production. That ruled out prima facie any kind of full-track design. Trucks were disqualified because any reasonably armored version would be heavy enough to overload suspensions and to lack off-road capacity. The answer came from the artillery—and indirectly from France.

Even before World War I, truck companies on both sides of the Atlantic had been experimenting with replacing rear wheels with some sort of track in order to lessen ground pressure and improve mobility in mud, snow, and sand. Most prominent in this effort was French engineer Adolphe Kegresse, whose successful conversion of some of Russian Tsar Nicholas’s autos inspired the Putilov armaments works to consider a project for military half-tracks. After the war the French firm of Citroën developed several civilian versions, staging well-publicized desert crossings in North Africa and central Asia and attracting the particular attention of a French army still engaged in Morocco and southern Algeria.

From the later 1920s, half-tracks made up a steadily increasing percentage of France’s military motor vehicles. Initially and primarily used as artillery and engineer vehicles, they found their way to the mounted troops as well. The French cavalry division as reorganized in 1932 had 150 armored versions as reconnaissance and combat vehicles. Another hundred, unarmored, carried the men and weapons of the battalion of Dragons portés (motorized dragoons) newly created for each mounted division.

With such an example so ready at hand, as early as 1926 the Reichswehr’s Weapons Office began preparing its own design for half-track tractors. Daimler-Benz began working on a production version in 1931; by 1936, a series of vehicles from one ton to eighteen tons were on the drawing boards or in the field, mostly as artillery tractors. That reflected, in passing, the artillery’s continued reluctance to accept the urging of the Lutz/Guderian school and fully mechanize the panzer divisions’ fire support by developing self-propelled mounts. This was more than commitment to branch self-interest and a tradition of towing guns into battle. Tracked vehicles were still fragile relative to the weight and the recoil of even a light field piece like the standard 105mm howitzer. In addition to probable effects on accuracy, a breakdown took the gun out of action as well. Not until well into the Cold War would even the US army abandon towed guns as standard divisional-level weapons.

On the bright side from the panzers’ perspective, Hanomag’s three-ton tractor seemed well suited to carry a rifle squad. The armored chassis was provided by Büssing and the fit, if not perfect, was close enough for government work. At eight tons, with between 8 and 15mm of armor and mounts for two light machine guns, the 251 was tough and durable, eventually serving as the mount for a bewildering variety of weaponry. Tracks extending to nearly three-fourths of the chassis, plus a sophisticated steering system, compensated for an unpowered front axle and gave the vehicle better cross-country abilities than its US counterpart and eventual rival.

The technical hair in the soup of the 251 was its complexity. It may be argued as well that neither the infantry nor the panzers sufficiently internalized the need to emphasize rapid, large-scale production. The first A-model versions did not begin service trials until 1939, and there would never be enough of them to equip more than one battalion in all but a few favored panzer divisions.

Production delays bedeviled as well the 251’s smaller cousin. The SdKfz 250 developed out of a growing mid-1930s belief that reconnaissance was too vital an element of mobile war to be trusted to existing combinations of motorcycles and armored cars. At times it might be necessary to fight for information; at times it might be necessary to traverse rough ground to secure information. The solution was a half-sized half-track built on the chassis of the 1-ton artillery tractor. At 5.4 tons, with up to 14.5mm of armor, an open top, and a six-man crew, the 250 could move at almost 40 miles per hour, cover 300 miles on a single fueling, and, when necessary, put a few boots on the ground to search, destroy, and provide fire cover. It would not see service until 1940, but eventually it would prove almost as versatile a weapons platform as the 251. And its description completes the first tranche of Wehrmacht armor.

III

THE STORY OF the SdKfz 250 segues neatly into the institutional development of the armored force in the second half of the 1930s. On March 15, 1936, a Weapons Office memorandum allocated three missions to the armored force: supporting the infantry attack, providing antitank defense, and carrying out independent operations in cooperation with other motorized troops. But other ideas were also percolating through the military system. The cavalry in particular had been hemorrhaging men and talent. Five of its eighteen regiments had already been transformed into tank, motorized, or motorcycle units. The rest were shedding squadrons for the new antitank and reconnaissance battalions. The Wehrmacht had plans to retain horse cavalry on mobilization, but it would take the field assigned by squadrons to infantry divisions. Small wonder that increasing numbers of talented and/or ambitious junior officers were seeking their future in the mechanized units.

The cavalry had been the army’s social elite since the days of the Great Elector. Even in the Reichswehr years its officer corps included a high proportion of landed gentry: vons and von und zus. Its continuing influence had been highlighted by Maximilian von Weichs’s seamless move into command of the Wehrmacht’s first and only armored division. To respond to the march of progress was one thing; to fade ignominiously away was quite another.

Military considerations shaped the cavalry’s behavior as well. German strategy was, as noted above, still predicated on the defensive. In that context there seemed to be a valuable operational role for a modern force able to perform a screening function, initially engaging and channeling an enemy while the panzer divisions lurked in reserve as a final argument. And should, as expected, the national strategy eventually require a military offensive, then mechanized reconnaissance, screening, and pursuit would be even more necessary. The argument was sufficiently persuasive that in August 1937 the Army Command informed Lutz that instead of creating additional panzer divisions, it planned to create the first of three “light divisions” in the fall of 1937.

The short lives and undistinguished careers of these formations has somewhat obscured their intended character. Though used as such in the Polish campaign, they were not panzer divisions manqué. Nor, as is sometimes asserted, were they a direct response to the French army’s new light mechanized divisions. Their closest analogs are the armored cavalry regiments introduced in the US army’s order of battle during the Cold War era to provide mobility, firepower, and shock action at the operational-level cutting edge. The missions were strikingly similar: reconnaissance and screening, plugging gaps in the line, conducting delaying actions, quickly occupying vital sectors, and, finally, pursuit and overtaking of retreating enemy forces.

The light division’s norm was three “cavalry rifle battalions” and a “cavalry motorcycle battalion,” one or two reconnaissance battalions built around motorcycles and armored cars, and a three-company light tank battalion eventually to be equipped with the later, fast models of the Panzer II. Internal signs of the division’s mission were the transporter vehicles issued to the tank battalion to facilitate operational mobility and save wear on the tanks. The number of machine guns in the rifle battalions was about double that of standard infantry—a useful tactical force multiplier in either defense or attack. Externally, no one could mistake the light divisions’ retention of the cavalry’s yellow branch color as opposed to the pink of the panzer divisions. Nor could anyone mistake the creation of a separate corps command to supervise their training and development.

At the other end of the spectrum, the infantry was also brought under the mobile-warfare tent. It was increasingly clear that mechanization as such was having to compete with a broad spectrum of other rearmament initiatives, in the context of a regime that considered “prioritization” something of a swear word. The three authorized panzer divisions risked being submerged in a growing sea of foot- marching, horse-powered infantry—the exact kind of mass army the Reichswehr’s institutional mentality was conditioned to avoid.

On January 30, 1936, Beck recommended motorizing four infantry divisions. It was quick, it was cheap, and it was doable in the contexts of industrial production and manpower procurement. Beck described motorized divisions as necessary for rapid- approach marches and surprise movements, to provide mobile reserves for the high command, and as a counter to aerial interdiction of rail transport. Significant as well was the French army’s 1935 decision to motorize no fewer than seven of its first-line divisions. Armies resemble the fashion industry in their susceptibility to trends, and health aficionados in their quest for symmetry.

The Lutz/Guderian pressure persisted, and the heritage of fifteen years’ worth of theoretical consideration on the prospects of large-scale mobile war remained active. In May the General Staff described motorized divisions as having the same capacity as their standard counterparts, but with an added capacity for rapid movement and maneuver. Suitable as mobile reserves, presumably for defensive purposes, motorized divisions could also be concentrated in mobile armies, presumably for offensives at the operational level in combination with the light and panzer divisions.

Like the light divisions, the new motorized divisions received their own corps headquarters. They also kept their original branch color: white. Otherwise, they were not exactly given a lot of thought. Four standard infantry divisions simply turned in their horses for trucks, motorcycles, and a dozen armored cars. They did have one tactical advantage over their French counterparts. For mobility, the French division’s infantry depended heavily on a Groupement of trucks attached for each move. The German trucks were organic down to company/platoon level—a major difference in flexibility even if the trucks were essentially road-bound and highly vulnerable even to small-arms fire.

IV

THE SOLDIERS WERE confident that once Germany’s young men changed their brown shirts and Hitler Youth uniforms for army Feldgrau, their socialization away from National Socialism would be relatively easy. The relevant virtues the Nazis preached—comradeship, self-sacrifice, courage, community—had been borrowed from the army’s ethos. The army knew well how to cultivate them from its own resources. The new Wehrmacht had new facilities. Barracks with showers and athletic fields, plenty of windows, and amåple space between bunks were a seven days’ wonder to fathers and uncles who had served under the Empire. Leave policies were generous, and applied without regard for rank. Food was well cooked and ample. In the field, officers and men not only ate from the same kitchens; they used the same latrines. Uniforms looked smart and actually fit the wearers—no small matters to young men on pass needing to make quick impressions.

As the army expanded, its conscripts were motivated, alert, and physically fit to degrees inconceivable in all but the best formations of the Kaiser’s day. The fact that military service had been restricted gave it a certain appeal of the transgressive, the forbidden, something generally attractive to adolescent males. Thanks to the eighteen months of compulsory labor service required of all seventeen-year-olds since 1935, the new recruits required a minimum of socializing into barracks life, and were more than casually acquainted with the elements of close-order drill.

The army was still the army, and NCOs had lost none of their historic set of tools, official and unofficial, to “motivate” recalcitrants and make them examples for the rest. Even more than in the Reichswehr, however, officers and noncommissioned officers were expected to bond with their men, leading by example on a daily basis. One anecdote may stand for many experiences. A squad of recruits was at rifle practice. The platoon commander asked who was the best shot among them and offered a challenge: “Beat my score and you can have an early furlough.” At the end of three rounds, the private won by a single point—by grace of a lieutenant who knew how to lose without making it obvious. When the wheels came off in a combat situation, such officers seldom had to order “Follow me!”

German army discipline by British or American standards allowed harshness as a norm, and as the war went on, it escalated to large-scale draconic brutality quite apart from any alleged “Nazification.” Military service, however, had for more than a century been a major rite of passage for males in Prussia/Germany. That aspect not merely survived under the Weimar Republic, it acquired something like mythic status—again, in good part because service was so limited. Contemporary conscripts in France, Belgium, and Poland, to say nothing of the Soviet Union, were likely to have a substantially different perspective. An easy rite of passage is a contradiction in terms, but under Prussian kings and German emperors, the army’s demands had generally been understood as not beyond the capacities of an ordinarily fit, ordinarily well- adjusted twenty-year-old. Exceptions were just that. And in the Weimar years, a near-standard response of older generations across the social and political spectrum to anything smacking of late-adolescent malaise or rebellion was along the lines that what the little punks needed was some shaping up in uniform.

That mentality arguably echoed another facet of late-Weimar public opinion involving a closed institution: a growing obsession with crime, and a corresponding attack on the prison system as a rest cure for criminals. The latter criticism grew more vitriolic, especially on the Right, as the depression imposed greater hardships on ordinary citizens. By the time the Nazis took power, demands for stricter treatment of prisoners, and especially rigorous policies toward “incorrigibles,” were firmly in place. The Nazis were pleased to oblige.

The recruits who began occupying the new barracks and filling the ranks of new units when conscription was formally reintroduced in 1936 thus found themselves in a comprehensive environment supporting compliance, cooperation, and participation. At this stage the more extreme ramifications of both army discipline and Nazi ideology were usually fringe manifestations, affecting the kinds of outsiders usually generated by male bonding groups. And the armored force benefited disproportionately from the new military order. Service in the panzers was a particular plus for those young men who may not have been part of a motorized society but who were nevertheless eager for the opportunity. Anticipating one’s draft notice gave some freedom to choose one’s branch of service. The prewar armored force never lacked for volunteers.

Most of the sixteen weeks of basic training was done in the traditional fashion: by units, with recruits arriving at the depot in time-honored fashion. Their initial processing, however, differed to a significant degree from both pre-1914 practice and the patterns in contemporary conscript armies. While not ignoring experience, aptitude, education, and even social class, the German sorting and screening system paid close attention to what later generations would call personality profiles. Determination, presence of mind, and situational awareness were the qualities most valued, not only with an eye toward prospective candidates for NCO stripes and officers’ commissions—both vital for a rapidly expanding army—but as the foundation of an effective soldier.

German initial training was much more than simple hut-two-three-four. It can be compared to a combination of the US army’s basic training and its Advanced Infantry Training, informed by the Marine Corps mantra of “every man a rifleman.” This reflected an understanding gleaned from the trenches of the Western Front: The infantry is the army. It takes the highest percentage of casualties. Its moral and physical demands are the greatest. A soldier who cannot meet them is less than an effective soldier no matter his level of technical proficiency.

When new soldiers were formally sworn in, it was often in the presence of a flag, or a weapon symbolizing branch of service; in the panzer regiments, a tank. From there they moved into a mix of specialized instruction and field training. The former was the easiest. Crewmen were chosen for particular positions according to abilities demonstrated early in training. By 1940, the standard tank crew was five men: commander, gunner, loader, driver, and radioman. There was some cross-training, but tankers were expected to emphasize development of specialized skills: the crew was a team, a community, with everyone sharing everyday tasks of repair and housekeeping.

The fact that relatively few recruits were familiar with motor vehicles of any kind was in some respects an advantage. They had no inappropriate civilian habits to unlearn when it came to driving. They developed impressive skill at maintenance; one of the unremarked qualities of the armored force was an ability to keep its vehicles running at company levels through most of the war. Gunnery training was excellent, and as muzzle velocities and ranges increased, was supported by some of the war’s best optical equipment. German tank marksmanship was formidable from 1939 to 1945, a fact affirmed by any enemy who faced it.

Technical proficiency was only one side of the coin. Training at all stages emphasized direct, small-unit cooperation among tanks, infantry, engineers, and antitank gunners. Truppenführung, the army’s basic doctrinal manual, was published in 1933-34 as Heeresdienstvorschriften (Army Regulations) 300. Its introduction described war as subjecting the soldier to “the most severe tests of his spiritual and physical endurance.” Combat involved an unlimited variety of situations, changing frequently and suddenly and impossible to predict or calculate in advance. It also involved the independent will of the enemy. Misunderstandings and mistakes were to be expected. Overcoming them depended more on character than intellect. And character in the context of combat meant, above all, will.

That principle held good for all ranks, general to private. The days of Kadavergehorsamkeit (corpselike obedience) were long past—if indeed they ever existed. The question of nature versus nurture did not significantly engage the Wehrmacht. Long before Leni Riefenstahl celebrated Hitler’s version of the concept, the armed forces acted on the principle that a soldier’s will was essentially a product of cultivation. Drill was presented as a means to develop the reflex coordination of mind and body. In contrast to the practices in most Western armies, conscript or volunteer, troops trained day or night, at immediate notice, in all weather, under conditions including no rations. Combat conditions were simulated as closely as possible through the extensive use of live ammunition. An indelible part of German military lore was the “massacre of the innocents” in 1914, which described thousands of German youths, so badly trained that many could not even load a rifle, being shot down by British regulars they could not see. “Never again!” was the motto of the senior NCOs, who even before the war constantly reiterated that the minor hardships and vague risks of training were nothing compared to the reality of the front lines.

Casualties in training, while not exactly processed as routine, were nevertheless accepted as necessary, not least as a reminder of the dangers of carelessness and stupidity. During World War I, the German army had to grapple with the problems posed by fatalism. The belief that death was essentially random was logical enough in trench warfare. It also diminished situational alertness. The Reichswehr and then the Wehrmacht sought, in contrast, to inculcate both the belief that situations could be mastered and the skills to master them. Acquiring those skills, it should be noted, involved the systematic application of intellect. The modern German soldier was not conceived in the semi-mystical image of the Great War “front fighter,” as depicted by Ernst Jünger—transcending the challenge of industrial war by moral force. His was a synergy of warrior and technician—not the will keeping the intellect, but the two acting in a dialectic of combat to manifest the “character” described in Truppenführung. The combination of faith and works was as formidable in a military context as in a spiritual one.

In the course of the war, an army fighting under increasingly desperate situations would turn voluntarily to National Socialism as a motivator. In prewar years, the case was somewhat the reverse, in accordance with a tradition, dating to the Second Empire and continuing in the Reichswehr, of keeping “party politics” out of the barracks. The generals’ initial concern that the new Wehrmacht would be swamped by successive intakes of committed National Socialists proved exaggerated. In part that reflected the movement’s relatively short existence as a major social and political force. Four or five years were, as a rule, sufficient to put no more than a Nazi patina on existing viewpoints and values. At this stage, moreover, many of the values and qualities the army sought to cultivate were more or less congruent with both some elements of National Socialism and some attitudes at least accepted, if not affirmed, in German society at large.

In those contexts neither the army’s everyday routines nor the fundamental values and intentions underlying them were likely to be challenged in principle on any more than an individual basis. That reflected as well the Wehrmacht’s fundamental homogenization. Unlike its Imperial predecessor, it had no identifiable minorities: no Poles, no Alsatians, no Jews. The system of regionalized recruiting and replacement, sustained whenever possible throughout the war, put men with similar backgrounds and accents together, at least as the core of a particular unit. This meant that, as a general consequence, a soldier was less likely to be singled out as “the hillbilly,” “the guy from Brooklyn,” or as any other member of the “all- American squad” of war-movie mythology. A man had to single himself out, whether by attitude or behavior. Apart from any “pack instinct” allegedly hard-wired into male biology, the consequences were usually sufficiently unpleasant that a committed teenage Nazi was as likely to curb his enthusiasm for Hitler’s New Order as a sloven was likely to “learn to keep his rifle and himself just so.”

V

ONE OF THE more interesting phenomena since 1945 has been the development in the West, the US in particular, of a mythology depicting the German army of World War II as a “clean-shield” force fighting first successfully and then heroically against heavy odds, simultaneously doing its best to avoid “contamination” by National Socialism—a “band of brothers” united by an unbreakable comradeship. That concept of comradeship is arguably the strongest emotional taproot of what John Mearsheimer memorably dubbed “Wehrmacht penis envy.” Soldiers and scholars outside Germany have consistently cited “comradeship” as a major explanation of the “fighting power” the Reich’s opponents found so impressive. In American interpretations, German comradeship also serves as a counter to the flaws of a replacement/rotation system that during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, was based on individual assignments. One under-analyzed reason for the relatively high morale sustained by US ground forces in Iraq seems to have been the adoption of unit rotation.

After 1945, for German veterans, comradeship became the war’s central justifying experience—in good part by default. Few were willing to admit they had fought for Hitler and his Reich. The concept of defending home and loved ones was balanced, and increasingly overbalanced, by overwhelming evidence that the war had been Germany’s war from start to finish. What remained were half-processed memories nurtured over an evening glass of beer, or at the occasional regimental reunion: memories of mutual caring, emotional commitment, and sacrifice for others. Traditionally considered to be feminine virtues, these human aspects of comradeship made it possible for the soldier to come to terms morally and emotionally with war’s inhuman face—the destruction and the killing—and to come to terms as well with the nature of the regime his sacrifices had sustained.

Comradeship as understood in modern armed forces can be traced to the Revolutionary/Napoleonic era. It owes something to the extension of medieval ideals of chivalry to the common soldier in a context of general war. In the American Civil War, both sides presented themselves as fighting “for cause and comrades.” During World War I, the concept of “frontline comradeship” or “comradeship of the trenches” emerged—particularly in Germany—as a means of distinguishing those who had been “out there” from others whose war had been fought in the rear echelons, or at home in the factories and on the farms.

Soldiers of all countries, especially those recruited and organized on a regional basis, bonded naturally as a response to the unfamiliar horrors of the trenches. Frontline routines generated small relational groups based on affinity, proximity, and experience. These were, above all, survival mechanisms: a man physically or emotionally alone on the Western Front was a dead man, or a shell-shock case waiting to happen. The German groups developed affective as well as instrumental functions. More than their French or British equivalents, they functioned as surrogate families. Nurturing functions that civil society assigned to women were assumed by “men supporting men.” The case of Adolf Hitler indicated that these “trench families” could make room as well for eccentric cousins.

Thomas Kuehne interprets comradeship as a major source of the large-scale participation of “ordinary men” in what became the ordinary crimes of the Third Reich. Neither ideology nor fear motivated that behavior. Nor was it a primary consequence of war’s brutalizing effect. Instead, Kuehne argues convincingly, German soldiers longed for Gemeinschaft, the spiritual community described since the Enlightenment in glowing terms by intellectuals, Romantics, and not least politicians. Soldiers sought direct, personal Gemeinschaft even more in the context of Nazi promises that turned to dross as the bombs fell and the casualty lists grew.

The ad hoc, constantly renewed and reconstructed communities resulting from constant heavy losses were in part held together by the few old hands who set the tone and passed on the traditions. Newcomers not only seeking but needing to belong in order to survive physically and mentally sought out and affirmed the collective’s values. “Good” was defined as anything that strengthened the community. Kuehne asserts that in order to be accepted as a man among men, soldiers were ultimately willing to participate in activities forbidden by religion, by civil law, and even by the army itself. The highest prestige was enjoyed by the most open denier of norms—any norms. Doubts, scruples, and inhibitions were experienced before and after the collective behavior that affirmed the group against external challenges—and usually experienced privately.

Such considerations were, however, far in the German army’s future during what seemed the endless summers of the mid-1930s. A significant reason for the relative absence of this kind of reflection in military circles was the sheer amount of activity and stimulus involved in the Wehrmacht’s exponential expansion. There was so much to do and so much to learn, not only for the annual intakes of recruits but for officers and NCOs admiring their new badges of grade and rank. A high private from the old Reichswehr who was not sporting at least a Feldwebel’s pips and tresses was a near-anomaly. Career lieutenants and captains blossomed within months into majors and colonels, with even higher ranks on their horizons. This was more than simple careerism. It was a chance for brave work in one’s chosen career. To do good and to do well simultaneously is an enticing prospect. Promotions, moreover, frequently involved transfers to a different branch of service, where different skill sets and different requirements kept men busy staying abreast of the curve.

Nowhere were those patterns stronger than in an armored force coming into existence with the speed and force of an emerging volcano.

Between 1936 and 1938, the panzer division also began taking on the internal form later made familiar in World War II. The original Lutz/ Guderian division included too many tanks to control effectively. With much chopping and changing, the number was gradually reduced to around 350 in two two-battalion regiments. Each battalion had four companies with four platoons of five Panzer Is or IIs. And platoon training was the bedrock of panzer tactics.

There were four standard platoon formations: “one behind the other” for route marches, the “double rank” of commander followed by two pairs in approach marches, the “line” of four tanks with the commander in front for assembly, and finally the distinctive “wedge,” which was actually a V-formation with the commander—again—at the tip and two tanks spread out on either side of him. Company and battalion formations were essentially larger versions of the standard four. Effective enough to take the panzers through six years of war, they were simple enough to execute—once everyone knew how.

The guiding tactical principle was attack by fire and movement: platoons and individual tanks supporting each other, and in turn supported by motorized infantry, artillery, and engineers—an integrated combat team. Tank-against-tank combat was not considered something to be sought, merely an aspect of the overall mission. Its success depended on hitting first with superior firepower, and, like every other aspect of armored warfare, that situation was best created by seizing the initiative through maneuver. The faster the attack, the stronger the shock and the quicker the primary mission completed. A defeated enemy was to be pursued relentlessly, with every effort made to cut off his retreat and finish him on the spot.

Advance planning was likely to be limited. For commanders, that meant keeping orders brief and flexible. It meant informing every subordinate, down to the junior ranks, of the essentials: mission, forces, positions; cooperation with supporting elements; what to do once the initial objectives were achieved.

On exercise fields and maneuver grounds the principle of “sweat saves blood” was translated in the panzer divisions into thrown tracks, breakdowns, disrupted communications, lost directions, smashed fingers—and blistered ears when senior officers and NCOs evaluated the results. But from the panzer divisions’ beginnings, another ethos developed as well—a hands-on, unit-level recognition that mistakes were not merely normal but necessary. Commanders who operated from a “no-defects” mode were denying subordinates the opportunity to cultivate the situational awareness that would enable them to survive in combat, and the initiative that would enable them to triumph. A tanker looking over his shoulder for orders was a dead man walking.

Nor did it hurt morale when the tankers received a distinctive black uniform for dress and walking-out. It was partly derived from the black coveralls worn as duty uniforms for obvious reasons. At this point, black in German military culture did not yet have a sinister aura. It was rather a positive reminder of the uniforms worn by many of the volunteer units that fought against Napoleon: young, enthusiastic heroes willing to die for freedom. And old-time Panzermänner generally affirm that “tanker black” was a definite social asset in the bars and cafes.

VI

THE SPANISH CIVIL War appeared to consign much of this to that airy empire of dreams Heinrich Heine had described as the Germans’ true home. Its operations were characterized by the use of tanks both epi sodically and in small numbers. While occasionally as many as fifty or sixty might appear at one spot, fifteen or twenty was the usual norm on both sides. Rough terrain and poor roads limited movement. Poorly trained infantry eschewed the risks of staying close to tanks; the things drew fire. Not surprisingly, tanks proved disproportionately vulnerable to antitank guns—especially the light, handy 37mm types just coming into widespread use. When tanks did manage a local breakthrough, their next move usually involved turning around and fighting back to their own lines. Even the apostle of mobility, B. H. Liddell- Hart, concluded that the lessons of Spain were that the defense was presently dominant, and that few successes had been gained by maneuver alone. The French and Russian armies came institutionally to similar conclusions. So did most of the rest of Europe.

The widespread negative judgments on tanks may have reflected as well the image of the war, assiduously promulgated on the Left, as a struggle between Spain’s common people and its “establishment.” In that context the tank invited definition as a quintessential Fascist weapon. Songs and stories consistently described tanks and aircraft pitted against “guts and rifles,” with the latter combination ultimately triumphant. Within armies, even hard-shelled social and political conservatives might well take heart from this apparent reaffirmation that men, not machines, determine victory.

The Germans nevertheless continued on their pre-Spain course. It has been suggested that they did indeed react to the difficulties encountered by the Spanish and Italians in effectively employing armor. Instead of deciding the thing was impractical, however, they concluded that “of course these people can’t do it.” Robert M. Citino offers a more nuanced paradigm when he states that the Spanish Civil War was not a proving ground and “the Spaniards were not guinea pigs.” The Germans on the ground had neither the numbers of tanks, nor the tank technology, nor the degree of control to impose any of their ideas on the Nationalist high command in a systematic fashion. In contrast to the aircraft of the Condor Legion, the crews of the three dozen Panzer Is initially sent to Spain in October 1936 were restricted to training missions and observation—at least in principle. In fact, the tankers, whose strength eventually increased to three companies, regularly spent time at the front and were regularly rotated back to Germany. Their commander, a future general but then merely Major Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, personally led the Nationalist armored attack on Madrid in November 1936, and claimed to have participated in 192 tank engagements.

The men coming back from Spain were an invaluable conduit of lore from the sharp end to the grass roots of the panzer regiments. The wider results of their experience were summarized in a General Staff report of March 1939. The Nationalists, the document concluded, never used tanks in strengths larger than a company, and then only for infantry support. The corresponding restrictions on their movement made light tanks in particular vulnerable to even rudimentary antitank defenses. That, in turn, enhanced the need for gun-armed vehicles. Whenever possible, the Soviet tanks used by the Republicans were salvaged and welcomed for their high-velocity 45mm guns. And there was good reason for the German armored force’s emphasis on unit morale and individual moral fiber. The report mentioned that an initial enthusiasm for armored service among the Spaniards quickly evaporated when it became known what the inside of a burned-out tank looked like. By the end of 1938, rumor described captured Russian tanks as being crewed by pardoned criminals or men given a choice between prison and making a single attack in a tank.

This was hardly sufficient data to justify completely revamping the Wehrmacht’s approach to armored war. German professional literature regularly featured warnings against overemphasizing the Spanish experience. In more practical terms, the armor lobby was by now too firmly entrenched to be dislodged by internal means.

Higher-unit training in the peacetime panzer divisions continued to emphasize maneuvering and controlling tanks in large numbers. On June 1, 1938, the panzer divisions got their own manual, Richtlinien für die Führung der Panzerdivision. Emphasis on combined arms had not yet produced the closely integrated battle groups characteristic of the war’s later years. Instead the pattern was the panzer regiments leading and the motorized infantry acting in support, somewhat along the lines of the British armored divisions of 1943-44.

To a degree, that reflected the progress of training: Tank and motorized formations had to become comfortable in their own skins before they could begin to work in genuinely close harmony. But teething troubles notwithstanding, in the fall maneuvers of 1937, the 3rd Panzer Division put on an impressive show, breaking the enemy flank, successfully assaulting a bridgehead from the rear, then shifting again to disrupt logistics and headquarters systems—all in close cooperation with Luftwaffe elements.

Armored force theorists made a correspondingly forceful case for the concentration of the panzer divisions into a corps, and the concentration of that force at the operational Schwerpunkt, the vital spot, of the opening campaign. Heinz Guderian’s 1937 book Achtung—Panzer! is widely credited with structuring and popularizing that perspective. The book was in fact written on the recommendation of Lutz, who sought to make armored warfare’s case in a public context. It was derivative, a compilation of Guderian’s previous lectures and articles, but made up in conviction what it lacked in cohesion. Never lacking in an eye to the political sector, Guderian cited the Four-Year Plan, controlled by Hermann Göring, to support the argument that Germany would soon be able to produce enough synthetic fuel and artificial rubber to be freed from its current dependence on imports. He quoted Hitler’s affirmation of “the replacement of animal power by the motor [which] leads to the most tremendous technical and consequently economic change the world has ever experienced.”

Guderian’s concluding peroration that “only by providing the army with the most modern and effective armaments and equipment and intelligent leadership can peace be safeguarded” resonates ironically in the context of Hitler’s 1938 purging of the army high command and his subsequent reorganization of the armed forces’ command structure, culminating in his assumption of supreme command. The book, however, was widely discussed, and sold well enough to pay for Guderian’s first car—an amusing sidebar given his support for motorization.

Armored force doctrine and training placed increasing emphasis on ground-air cooperation. The long-standing myth that the Luftwaffe was essentially designed for close support of the land forces has been thoroughly demolished by, among others, James Corum and Williamson Murray. During World War I, the German air force had nevertheless paid significantly more specialized attention to ground support than its Allied counterparts. The Germans developed armored, radio-equipped infantry-contact machines for close reconnaissance. Used in twos, threes, and larger numbers, German Schlachtstaffeln (battle squadrons), each with a half dozen highly maneuverable two-seater Hannover or Halber stadt attack planes, proved devastatingly effective at shooting in attacks from the summer of 1917. In the later stages of the 1918 spring offensive, aircraft were used to parachute ammunition to frontline infantry. The experience of being on the receiving end of tank-infantry cooperation at the hands of the BEF in the war’s final months drove home the lesson: close air support was a good thing for an armored force.

During the Weimar years the Reichswehr worked closely with the civil aircraft industry and the civilian airlines to keep abreast of industrial and technological developments. Under the guidance of Hans von Seeckt, German officers developed intellectual and doctrinal frameworks for air war in general and air-ground cooperation in particular. As early as 1921, regulations stressed the importance of using attack aircraft in masses against front lines and immediate rear areas. Maneuvers used balloons to represent forbidden aircraft, and emphasized unit-level antiaircraft defense with machine guns and rifles in lieu of the banned specialized weapons. In Russia, from 1925 to 1933, the air school at Lipetsk successfully functioned as both a training base for pilots and a testing ground for aircraft.

The initiation of full-scale rearmament and the creation of the Luftwaffe as an independent service temporarily combined to take air and ground on separate paths in the mid-1930s. Luftwaffe theorists accepted using fighters for direct support of ground forces as a secondary mission, but emphasized the greater importance of interdiction behind—well behind, as a rule—the fighting front. That attitude began to change as reports from the Spanish Civil War highlighted not merely the potential but the ability of aircraft to have a decisive effect on ground operations—especially against troops poorly trained, demoralized, or even temporarily confused. Nationalist or Republican, it made no difference.

Luftwaffe officers were increasingly expected to know army tactics and doctrine; to participate directly in army exercises and maneuvers as air commanders; to instruct the army in the nature and missions of air power. At the focal point of the new relationship was the armored force. Luftwaffe doctrine insisted air support must be concentrated at decisive points, not dispersed across fronts and sectors. This concept meshed precisely with the panzer commanders’ emphasis on concentration, speed, and shock.

Implementation took three forms. One was the creation of specialized tactical reconnaissance squadrons assigned at corps and division levels, and the parallel development, from field army headquarters down to panzer divisions, of a system of air liaison officers to report ground-force situations to air officers commanding the supporting reconnaissance squadrons and the antiaircraft units.

The Luftwaffe’s second contribution was close support. As early as the 1937 maneuvers, an entire fighter group, 30 aircraft, was placed at the disposal of a single panzer division. The obsolescent Henschel Hs 123 biplane, a failure in its intended role as a dive-bomber, found a second identity as a ground-attack aircraft whose slow speed and high maneuverability made its strikes extremely accurate. The Junkers 87 Stuka dive-bombers, deployed in small numbers to Spain, manifested near pinpoint accuracy and had a demoralizing effect out of proportion with the actual damage inflicted. Given the right conditions, it seemed clear that a few Stukas could achieve better results than entire squadrons and groups of conventional bombers. Throughout 1938, Stukas and Henschels exercised with panzer formations in an increasing variety of tactical situations. In the air and on the ground, the same conclusion was being drawn: Close air support, especially in the precise forms normative for dive and attack planes, could become “flying artillery fire,” bringing the tanks onto initial objectives and keeping them moving not merely at tactical but perhaps operational levels as well.

No less significant was the Luftwaffe’s third contribution: the development of a maintenance and supply system mobile enough to keep pace with the armored columns and keep the relatively short-ranged close support aircraft in action even from improvised airfields. Turnaround time and sorties mounted are better tests of air-power effectiveness than simple numbers of planes. It would be a good few years before the panzer divisions would have to wonder where the Luftwaffe was. It would be striking just ahead of them.

Colonel Hans Jeschonnek was appointed Luftwaffe Chief of Staff in February 1939. A bomber officer with—limited—unit experience, he nevertheless recognized both the importance and the difficulty of integrating close air support to ground operations. He understood as well the desirability of keeping air assets under Luftwaffe control—not as easy as it might seem even with Göring as chief, given the army’s historically dominant position in Germany’s military system. Jeschonnek’s response was to organize a specialized ground-support force. In the summer of 1939 he began consolidating the Stuka groups into a Nahkampfdivision (close-combat division). Its commander was Wolfram von Richthofen, cousin of the Red Baron, who had extensive Spanish experience and was among the Luftwaffe’s leading dive-bomber enthusiasts. Eventually the division would expand into a full and famous corps. But with more than 300 first-line combat aircraft on strength in September 1939, it was already the world’s largest and most formidable ground-support air element.

The panzers experienced the differences between the most rigorous maneuvers and the least demanding field conditions in March 1938. That was the month when Hitler bullied the right-wing government of Austria into accepting Anschluss, or union, with the Third Reich—a more fundamental violation of the Versailles settlement than rearmament had been. He convinced the rest of Europe to accept it through the application of diplomatic smoke and mirrors. The 2nd Panzer Division was ordered to join the Wehrmacht forces assigned to occupy the Reich’s new province. The new mobile forces had deliberately been held back from earlier “flower occupations” of the Rhineland and the Saar. Now Guderian had two days’ notice to march his division from its garrison in Würzburg the 250 miles to the soon-to-be-former border, and then enter Vienna in presumed triumph.

The result was one of the most monumental compound fiascoes in the entire history of mechanized operations. Guderian, a master at presenting himself in the best possible light, could find nothing good to say about the inadequate planning, inadequate maintenance, and inadequate logistics that left broken-down tanks stranded on every major road out of Würzburg and constrained the survivors to refuel from obliging Austrian filling stations whose low-octane gas fouled engines so badly that many vehicles required major overhauls at the end of the march. Perhaps it was just as well that the division remained in Vienna once the garrison-shifting generated by the Anschluss was completed. In any case, Guderian stood at Hitler’s side when the Führer spoke in his hometown of Linz, and basked in his pleasure at the sight of the tanks the mechanics were able to keep going.

Hitler’s instructions of May 1938 for the Wehrmacht to prepare for an invasion of Czechoslovakia escalated the prospects of a general war Germany had little chance of winning. Ludwig Beck resigned as Chief of the General Staff in August. His successor, Franz Halder, inherited the outlines of a generals’ plot to seize Hitler’s person as soon as he issued orders for an invasion of Czechoslovakia. Some senior army officers, including Beck, had grown sufficiently dubious about the risks of Hitler’s freewheeling foreign policy in the context of Germany’s still-incom plete rearmament that they had developed plans for a “housecleaning.” These plans involved eliminating Nazi Party radicals, restoring traditional “Prussian” standards in justice and administration, and putting Hitler firmly under the thumb of the military leadership. Should that last prove impossible and the Führer suffer a fatal accident—well, no plan survives application, and the state funeral would be spectacular.

Whether anything would have come of it remains a subject of speculation. The agreements secured from Britain and France at the Munich Conference of September 1938 left Czechoslovakia twisting in the wind, and hung any potential military conspirators out to dry. Czechoslovakia’s western provinces, the Sudetenland, were ceded to the Reich without a shot fired. Those who had urged caution on the Führer were correspondingly discredited.

These events had less direct impact on the armored force than might have been expected. On an operational level, the main problem was seen as breaking through formidable Czech border defenses—a task for infantry, artillery, and aerial bombardment that brought more conventional generals to the fore of planning. Internal attention was further diverted by a major reorganization. In addition to forming the corps headquarters authorized for the light and motorized divisions, the former Mobile Combat Troops Command became XVI Corps, with the three panzer divisions under its direct command. Three new divisions were added to the order of battle. The 4th Panzer Division formed at Würzburg to replace the 2nd. The 4th Light Division was built around elements of the former Austrian army’s Mobile Division in Vienna. And in November, the 5th Panzer Division was organized at Oppeln, in Silesia, with many of its recruits coming from the newly annexed Sudetenland.

A number of the tank battalions already existed as separate formations, part of Beck’s program for providing direct support to infantry divisions. The restructuring nevertheless meant more rounds of reas signments and promotions. The three mobile corps were assigned to a new army-level command created in 1937: Group 4, under Walther von Brauchitsch—the stepping-stone to his appointment as commander in chief of the army a few months later. Lutz briefly commanded XVI Corps, then was put on the retired list in 1938. This has been described as a forced retirement, a response at higher levels reflecting criticism of the way the armored force seemed to be developing as an army within the army.

This argument is supported by Brauchitsch’s character and branch of service. He was an artilleryman, and while a solid professional, was neither a forceful personality like Guderian nor a smooth operator in the pattern of Lutz. Lutz’s removal from the scene, however, can also be interpreted in wider contexts, as part of a housecleaning of senior ranks reflecting both Hitler’s desire for more malleable generals and the High Command’s belief in the need for fresh blood.¹ Lutz was one of those who had openly questioned the Führer’s policies as excessively risky. Lutz was also sixty-two, the same age as Gerd von Rundstedt, also retired in 1938—arguably a bit over the line for field command in the kind of war he had done so much to create. Lutz was unlikely to step down of his own accord, though allowing him to learn of his new status from a newspaper article was unmistakably déclassé.

The appointment of Guderian as Lutz’s successor in command of XVI Corps also suggests that Lutz was not singled out for removal on either political or professional grounds. The German army, like its counterparts before and since, had an ample number of sidetracks for officers identified with mentors who made career-ending slips. But in 1938 the Inspectorate of Motorized Combat Troops and the Inspection for Army Motorization were combined into a single agency with the mouth-filling title of Inspection Department 6 for Armored Troops, Cavalry, and Army Motorization (In6). Its focus was to be on nuts and bolts: training, organization, technology. At the same time, an Inspectorate of Mobile Troops was established to develop doctrine and tactics, supervise the schools, and advise both the army high command and In6 on the operational aspects of mobile war. The post was offered to Heinz Guderian.

The appointment had a back story. The new Inspectorate seems to have been Brauchitsch’s idea. Hitler approved. Guderian initially turned down the post on the grounds that it lacked any real authority; he could only make recommendations. When Hitler informed him that his advisory responsibility meant that, if necessary, he could report directly to the Führer in his capacity as Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht, Guderian changed his mind. A promotion to General der Panzertruppen (Lieutenant-General) further sweetened the deal.

This account has been challenged by Guderian’s friend, General Hermann Balck. Balck describes a cabal involving Brauchitsch and the General Staff to kick Guderian upstairs, or at least sideways, in order to minimize the effect of what was considered his “tunnel vision” on the subject of army motorization. Some support for that unverifiable hypothesis is offered by Guderian’s initial assignment in the new mobilization scheme: command of a second-line infantry corps in the western theater. In 1940, Erich von Manstein would receive a similar assignment for the same reasons: as an obvious slap on the wrist, and as a warning against excessively close contact with the Führer. In Guderian’s case, however, that contact was a bit too valuable to waste, given the growing indications that one of the Third Reich’s alleged “two pillars” was significantly overtopping the other.

At least that seems to have been the opinion of Brauchitsch’s successor as commander of Group 4. Walther von Reichenau stood out among the army’s generals as an admirer of Hitler, and assiduously cultivated his own back channels to the Führer. He was unlikely to seek to choke off Guderian, especially since the two men were much alike in aggressive temperament and blinkered vision.

Guderian’s driving energy was immediately put to use. Lutz was no weakling, but his chief talents had been as a negotiator and a facilitator. The panzer divisions suffered from constant teething troubles, expected and unexpected. The senior formations were still very much works in progress. In a 1938 exercise, the staff of the 1st Panzer Division created a foul-up beyond the generous tolerance for maneuver mistakes. Perhaps energized by Hitler’s presence, Guderian not only blasted the regiment’s officers but ordered some punitive transfers “to encourage the rest.” Guderian also struggled mightily with the cavalry in an effort to wean them away from a historic commitment to screening and reconnaissance. On the technical side, Guderian iterated and reiterated the importance of radio communication—increasingly with aircraft as well as vehicles. Though initially unable to provide every tank with a transmitter, he did make sure each had a receiver.

With the occupation of the rump Czech state in March 1939, Guderian and the armored force simultaneously acquired a windfall and a problem. The windfall reflected Bohemia’s history as a center of arms design and manufacture under Habsburg rule. The Czechoslovak government cultivated that heritage, and in the 1930s produced two state-of-the-art designs. The TNHP 35 weighed a little more than 10 tons with 35mm of armor on the front and 16mm on the sides. It could do 25 miles per hour on roads, was high-maintenance but easy to operate, and, best of all, carried a high-velocity 37mm gun. The TNHP 38 was even better. At 10 tons with 25mm of frontal armor, it was more maneuverable than the 35, carried the same 37mm gun, and on the whole was roughly equal to the Panzer III, which was still backed up on German production lines.

The Germans’ initial problem was adapting their new tanks to Wehrmacht requirements. The armored force took over about 200 of what were rechristened the 35(t), for Tsechoslowakei, and began the extensive modifications necessary, particularly in radio equipment, to make them suitable for German service. The 38(t) was just coming into production when the Germans marched in and began testing the design. In May 1939 the Weapons Office contracted with the Czech factory to manufacture 150 of them. They were the first of a long line of 38(t)s that would serve throughout the war in a variety of roles. None, however, would be ready for service by September 1, 1939.

On the organizational side, on November 24, 1938, von Brauchitsch issued a sweeping directive for the development of the army’s motorized forces. It projected a final goal of nine panzer divisions, to be met by converting the four light divisions in the fall of 1939. Each army corps would have a motorcycle battalion; each field army would receive a number of motorized reconnaissance battalions. Independent armored brigades were projected as well, to support conventional infantry divisions or cooperate with motorized ones—the latter a possible foreshadowing of the panzer grenadier divisions. Finally, a number of independent companies equipped with “the heaviest kind of tanks” would support infantry attacks against fortifications.

On April 1, 1939, the General Staff ordered the creation of four new panzer divisions—effective, ironically, on September 19. In practice, that meant raising and training the tank units and supporting formations necessary to upgrade the light divisions. At the same time, the armored force was allocating the revamped Czech tanks and the Panzer IIIs and IVs also beginning to enter service. As if that was not enough, the panzers were increasingly drafted for display purposes; parades in Berlin and other German cities were designed to impress not only foreign observers but a German population that cheered Hitler’s bloodless victories and yet retained a vivid collective memory of World War I.

Whatever the tanks may have provided in terms of intimidation and reassurance, Guderian and his generals were less than pleased at the waste of time and energy. The fall maneuvers, however, were expected to compensate. For the first time the armored force was to take the field in strength: XVI Corps would control three panzer divisions, the 4th Light Division, and a motorized division. Deploying that force would require implementing the first stages of mobilization for the units involved. To test the concept of the air-ground combat team on a similar scale, the Luftwaffe would provide its new tactical support force. The exercises were never held. Instead, on September 1, 1939, the panzers went to war for real.

VII

THE CRITIQUE OF mass war developed in German military thought after 1918 had never excluded numbers, per se. Its goal had been the eventual creation of a force able to achieve decisive tactical and operational results initially, thus avoiding the spiral of escalation forcing Germany into a war of attrition—exactly the kind of war the professional soldiers had warned for years and decades that Germany had no chance of winning. The army that took the field, however, was the product of improvisation. The steady pace originally projected by the General Staff and the High Command was submerged by a rearmament that rapidly became its own justification and increasingly outran available human and material resources. Even after the Blood Purge of 1934 eliminated the possibility of using the SA as the basis for an alternative military system, the army continued to fear dual loyalty in an increasingly Nazified society. Total war of the kind Hitler seemed willing not merely to risk but to affirm remained, in strategic terms, the wrong kind of war for Germany. And in social and political contexts, a mass war involving the German Volk was likely to benefit the Nazis far more than the soldiers.

Since the Napoleonic Wars the Prussian/German army had stressed the desirability of a high average quality. The General Staff developed as a leaven to the officer corps as a whole, rather than a self-absorbed elite. In operational terms, one regiment, division, or corps had been considered as capable as any other. When reserve divisions were organized on a large scale as part of the run-up to World War I, they were structured as far as possible to the active army’s norms, and from the beginning were used in the same way as active formations. In 1939, however, most of the divisions were formed by Wellen (waves), each with differing scales of equipment, levels of training, and operational effectiveness. Now in planning for war, the army was constrained to develop a hierarchy of dependability, with the peacetime divisions of the “first wave” at its apex—and the mobile divisions at the apex of the first wave.

That situation offered the army a political and military window of opportunity. The tactical, doctrinal, and institutional concepts developed by the Reichswehr and refined after 1933 provided the prospect of decisive offensive operations executed not by a small professional army but by specialized technocratic formations within a mass. High-tech force multipliers favored developing an elite group; not in the racial/ ideological sense of the emerging Waffen SS, not even an elite element depending on personnel selection like the paratroopers of the British and US armies, but a functional elite, based on learned skills. Its professionalism would enable the employment of ways of war, inapplicable by homogenized mass armies in the pattern of 1914-18, that would bring victories despite the institutional weaknesses of the new Wehrmacht—and despite any signs of clay feet or cardboard spine Germany’s Führer might show along the way.